The following article is an excerpt from The Eleventh Hour by Michael Phillips.

Nobody but an author could understand quite how a book takes you over and, in a sense, “writes itself.” You’ve all heard that phrase, I’m sure. You probably have mixed reactions to it. One of my editors, quite some time ago, in response to my attempt to explain the phenomenon, replied, “That’s a little spooky, Mike… you don’t want readers to hear you talking like that!”

Well, certainly, no book really does write itself. It’s a lot of hard work and takes a long time, and of course the author has to put in his fair share of the process and know what he’s about. Yet there really does exist a mysterious dynamic in it all. Once you set some foundational momentum in motion, characters actually do some times pull you along almost as if they were setting the pace and direction. Your only job is to follow where they lead!

My wife, Judy (who is intrinsically involved with me in the development of nearly every book bearing my name), and I, along with our friend Judith Pella, were all three aware of that process throughout the writing of Robbie Taggart. Robbie himself proved such a captivating fellow that we quite literally followed him all over the globe, waiting—and maybe here’s where it gets spooky—to see what would happen to him next.

In the writing of the Stonewycke books, the two main characters, Maggie and Ian, did not even exist in the three of our minds when we began.

They wandered into the story sort of accidentally, and then proceeded to take the whole thing over. Before long they were setting the course for the entire rest of the series! Characters do that. Plots and situations and relationships do that too. There can be stories that quite literally compel themselves to be told.

The Secret of the Rose is such a story.

We love roses. I gave Judy yellow roses before we were married, and we have been exchanging them ever since. The other day, in the dead of winter, Judy picked a stray red bud that didn’t seem to know the season for blooms was past off one of the bushes in our yard. The leaves were a little small, sort of a brownish green, not the lush and brilliant shapes and textures of spring. Though nicely formed, the flower itself was stinted of size, and it seemed clear this specimen would never mature to full stature. It was a “wintry” rose.

Judy clipped it with about twelve straight inches of stem, put it in a slender vase, and set it on the bathroom counter. Something about it, however, was unique. This was no ordinary rose. Perhaps its charm was heightened by the tiny bud-shape, which would never open into full-petaled array. Perhaps it was the strong odor of red which, in spite of the petals being tightly folded, warmed by coming inside the house, began to spread its perfume out through the bathroom and beyond. Perhaps it was the symbolism of its brave flowering in the midst of the two weeks we had just had of driving rains and frigid, fierce winds. How did it come to find life in the midst of all that?

Yet there it was, sticking up its proud, tall head—let the rain and wind do their worst. Every time she passed the bathroom Judy could not help glancing in. There stood the small red fragrant winter rose… calling her… beckoning her to inquire into its mystery. It was only a flower, you might say. Do you really think there’s all that to read into it? I suppose all writers have a healthy dose of poet and mystic in them.

Judy and I are always looking at everyday occurrences from such allegorical and significative angles. If it seems a little odd, you’ll have to forgive us. We’ve been married over twenty years and still give each other roses. I suppose we’re hopeless romantics. But then… maybe that’s why I write books! In any case, we had, during this time, been talking about and brainstorming several new book and plot ideas.

Two mornings later Judy called at my office and told me about the rose she had picked.

“I can’t help thinking there’s a story here,” she said. “Can’t you just see a book called The Rose? It’s so simple, yet full of… I don’t know— don’t you feel the mystique in it?”

“Yeah, yeah… right,” I replied. I was busy on something else at the time. End of discussion. Half an hour later the phone rang again. Essentially we repeated the same conversation all over again. My wife was being the romantic at that stage, not me!

Again the phone rang. “I’m sorry,” laughed Judy. “I don’t mean to sound like a broken record, but I think there’s something here. There’s a story behind this rose, I’m sure of it! A mystery, a love story… something! Picture this scene….”

By this time I was ready to listen. Actually, in the meantime, somewhere between the second and third call, the same compelling sense of a story had begun slowly to come over me too. So now when Judy called, I found pictures and feelings and thoughts rising spontaneously out of my own awakened poetic side as well.

Suddenly in my mind was the image of a man, lonely from loss, sitting in a rocking chair, holding the fragrant dead leaves of a treasured rose potpourri— Before I could finish telling what I had envisioned, Judy was telling me of— Well, you will read all about it soon enough! We finished our conversation.

A few minutes later Judy showed up at my office door with the red rose in hand, in a vase for my desk. She sat down and, after we both admired it a while, we began to talk once more. Literally within a matter of minutes, we both knew that this was a story that had to be told, a story that compelled itself onto the page, a story that was bigger than we were.

Perhaps you’ll agree with my editor’s comment of years ago and think all this sounds a little strange. Another editor once told me that authors were known to be somewhat of a peculiar breed, so maybe all this is in keeping with that! But in all seriousness I say that there was a strong sense of truth about the whole (may I call it this?) revelation. It became extremely real, as if a true piece of history were being “revealed” to us, a story that our little wintry rose knew all about, because it knew the universal story of roses everywhere and was determined to tell us. So it raised up its persistent head in the midst of the storm, and it beckoned to us.

“Let me tell you of some of my brother and sister roses,” it said. “They are dead now, but their hearts are preserved, and some of their petals have been crushed, so that in death they might live on. For the aroma and bouquet of a rose never dies. If but one has smelled of its glory and sighed, or smiled, or thought of a loved one, that rose has been lifted into realms of the eternal. For those who love them, even the petals have fragrance. In the hope of giving such pleasure they expend their perfumes abroad over all the lands of the earth.

In the heart of the rose is contained the tale of love universal. For what other purpose have roses been created than to assist in the telling of that saga and to offer faint, fragrant glimpses of that greater creating Love out of which are born and in which dwell all the loves of the universe? The reminders of its sachet can be bittersweet as well as jubilant, however. Love is no respecter of feelings. And that is why I, a winter’s rose, with a touch of sadness in my shriveled leaves, have come to lead you into this particular tale.

I came out of the ground, not to tell you the story of the rose, but so that you might smell my sweet balm and behold the creating Love by beholding me. And, gazing into my wintry face, that you might seek and discover that story I would tell you if I could but speak of my brother and sister roses, who lived across the sea, in a time now gone and of the men and women who loved them.”

So I sat down at my typewriter the next day to see if I could discover the beginning strands of the mysteries our rose may have been thinking about.

– Excerpted from the introduction of The Eleventh Hour by Michael Phillips